A City with Foundations
by David Blankenhorn, American Experiment Quarterly, Summber 2001


Some people - including me and, I suspect, many readers of American Experiment Quarterly - are troubled by the decline of marriage. We argue that many of our most pressing social problems stem from the disintegration of the family, society's basic institution, and as a result, we believe that our society would be happier and healthier if marriages became stronger and more permanent. Many of us support and participate in an emerging "marriage movement," a broadly diverse group of educators, scholars, counselors, civic and religious leaders, and others who are seeking new ways to strengthen marriage.¹

For such people, what are the best arguments to propound and the best strategies to pursue? Is it best to seek to vitalize marriage in its entirety - in all of its complexity and, in a sense, for its own sake - or is it best instead to make the public case for marriage more pragmatically and narrowly, primarily on the grounds that marriage is good for children?

To take the last question first, I do not favor putting all or even most of our marriage eggs in a what's-best-for-children basket, since I suspect that all utilitarian defenses of marriage - it's good for your children, you'll live longer, you'll have more money and be happier - are helpful, but insufficient.² To see why, consider briefly the essential foundations of marriage.

Historically, marriage seems largely to have originated in necessity, or survival - the ultimate utilitarian rationale. Specifically, for many centuries, the publicly defined male-female pairbond both dramatically increased the human infant's chances of survival and also guided potentially dangerous adult sexual behavior in prosocial directions. This dimension of sheer necessity is a primary reason why marriage is a universal, or what many scholars call a "natural," human institution.

But in rich modern societies, marriage is no longer a matter of survival. Yes, married adults remain typically better off than unmarried adults, just as children of marriage remain typically better off than children of divorce or nonmarriage. But during the past half century or so, for the first time in human history, nonmarriage and divorce on mass scales have also become physically viable ways of living. We have used our unprecedented affluence in large measure to purchase unprecedented personal freedom, including freedom from binding obligations and the freedom to presume to make up our own rules. We have become rich enough, in short, to transform marriage from a broad necessity to a personal option. For these reasons, mounting a modern defense of marriage primarily on utilitarian grounds, while it is still possible and valid, and in some way is the path of least resistance, may turn out in the long run to be our least effective strategy.

The Whole Prize

If not for necessity's sake, then, why should modern people get married? There are two other deep and probably universal foundations of marriage in human societies. One is religious. For people of faith, the marriage vow is always in part what Peter L. Berger calls a signal of transcendence, pointing to something larger than the spouses themselves. Accordingly, the marriage vow in human societies is almost always understood, at least in part, as a sacred promise, involving God as well as the couple and the community. In this sense, marriage both contains a clear teleology and also suggests for spouses a distinctly religious calling or aspiration, encouraging us to love one other person with a clarity and intensity that can give us a hint of how God loves each of us.

The third deep foundation of marriage is sexual complementarity - the essential recognition, as the famous song puts it, that "woman needs man, and man must have his mate." It is the profound yearning for human completion, specifically for lasting sexual reunion, or the bringing together of the male and female dimensions of the human person into "one flesh."

These last two foundational defenses of marriage, spiritual transcendence and sexual complementarity, strike me as among the most difficult to make today - certainly I don't feel very well equipped to make them - and also by far the most important. Ultimately, utilitarian defenses of marriage are unpersuasive because marriage is more than a sensible arrangement. People do not marry because marriage is useful; they marry because they want everything, the whole prize. People marry because they desire to love and be loved, erotically, unselfishly, mysteriously, permanently. In this sense, getting married is anything but an exercise in practicality; as my colleague Maggie Gallagher points out, it is the boldest and most idealistic thing that most of us will ever do.

Our core strategic and intellectual challenge in this decade, then, is not to speak mundanely about marriage, but to speak expansively, using the big words of anthropology, philosophy, and theology; not about marriage as a kind of health insurance or child care program - the lifestyle equivalent of eating one's peas - but instead about marriage as an act of moral aspiration and high adventure, compared to which the posturings of today's dime-a-dozen libertines and sexual cynics come across as flat, stale, and unimaginative.

Regarding sex and marriage, modern societies are clearly making the leap from necessity to freedom, and there appears to be, whether we would want it or not, no turning back. So let us make the most of it, deciding as best we can not only what we moderns are free from, but also what we are free for. One of the finest things we are made for, I believe, is loving, permanent marriage. Making this case to the next generation, and the one after that, is the single most important goal of the emerging marriage movement in the United States and the other rich countries.³

Changing Our Minds

What, specifically, then, is to be done? Considering the main dimensions of marital decline - the separation of marriage from childbearing, the general weakening of marriage as an institution, and low birthrates - and also recognizing the need to vitalize the essential sexual and spiritual foundations of marriage, here are . . . six puny ideas, to be supplemented and elevated by other contributors and by readers. Each of these proposals is based on the principle that the most important thing to change is our minds.

First, Wade Horn of the National Fatherhood Initiative has wisely proposed a "marriage," or at least a serious courtship, that would begin to unite the emerging marriage movement with the  growing number of grassroots efforts devoted to strengthening fatherhood in the United States. Conceptually, affirming the importance of fathers clearly leads to recognizing the significance of the mother-father bond. In this sense, a grassroots fatherhood movement is a natural precursor to a marriage movement. At the same time, the U.S. fatherhood movement is currently sharply divided on the subject of marriage. Some fatherhood leaders view marriage as an all but irreplaceable life support system for effective fatherhood, while others favor policies and programs that are, in effect, either silent or neutral on the question of marriage. For this and other reasons, more dialogue between today's fatherhood and marriage leaders would deepen everyone's understanding and almost certainly enhance the effectiveness of both movements.

Second, despite considerable popular and legislative support for no-fault divorce, legal and family scholars, marriage leaders, and state legislators should work hard in this decade to change public and elite opinion, and ultimately change state laws, regarding the legal dissolution of marriages in the United States. The basic proposition - still widely resisted, but increasingly supported, in my view, by the weight of evidence - is that divorce laws significantly affect divorce rates, and that no-fault divorce, by relentlessly favoring whoever wants to end the marriage, has increased the divorce rate and weakened marriage.⁴ The corollary to this proposition is that even modest reforms of no-fault statutes, such as longer waiting periods combined with mandatory counseling, may well lower the divorce rate and improve marital satisfaction.

For many in the marriage movement, this is a hard issue. Directly challenging no-fault divorce would clearly be an uphill fight. It would require new intellectual understandings and new and better public arguments. Also, many of us are understandably wary of trying to legislate better marriages. In particular, law is seen as a blunt tool, restrictive and universally binding, whereas education and private persuasion are viewed as "softer" and less coercive strategies. All true, and these are exactly the reasons why I hope that we will tackle this issue.

Third, the marriage movement should ask the U.S. Congress to reform the federal tax code so that the code realistically recognizes, rather than discriminates against, married couples with children. The details are myriad, but the basic principles are twofold: generous exemptions for  children (which would likely do more than any other policy to raise the marital birthrate) and permitting spouses fully to share their income for purposes of taxation.⁵ The U.S. tax code is probably the nation's single most important family policy. Here is an ideal way for the marriage movement to enter the national policy debate.

Fourth, when the U.S. Congress debates reauthorization of welfare reform in 2001, the marriage movement should strive to ensure that a distinct marriage preparation and education component is included in any new bill. Phase one of welfare reform was an emphasis on work. Phase two should be an equal emphasis on the two-parent home and on marriage.

Fifth, I can't imagine how overall child centeredness in the United States could realistically increase without a corresponding decrease in consumerism and in hours at work.6 Consequently, anything that aims to cultivate the home economy as compared to the market economy - generous workplace policies regarding family and parental leave; more options for job-sharing, part-time, and at-home work; more respect and policy support for motherhood and for at-home parenting; buying less stuff; turning down job promotions that would cause family hardships; new government restrictions on advertisements aimed at children - is probably a good thing. For starters, here is one possible rule of thumb to embrace: Among married parents with minor children, time spent in paid employment should not exceed sixty hours per couple per week.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I hope that scholars and other marriage leaders will engage in a sustained effort in this decade to establish and articulate publicly the essential phenomenology, the deep foundations, of sexual love and marriage in modern society. Thirty years into the contemporary divorce revolution, and only a moment or two into a new grassroots movement to renew marriage, this work is necessarily in its infancy. We are still struggling, and debating one another, over issues of vocabulary conceptual framework. At the most basic level, how is our movement proposing to strengthen marriage? By teaching spouses to communicate more effectively? Improving their interpersonal skills? Discovering and conveying to young people the generic qualities of healthy relationships? Helping people to determine what way of living works best for them? Advocating for gender equity? Insisting on what is best for children? Doing what religious leaders encourage?

Let's stipulate that each of these ideas is valuable. But let's also say, or at least I am suggesting, that none of them adequately answers for rising generations the most important question, which is "Why marry?" Let this intellectually and morally exciting work, aiming at a deeply grounded but new synthesis, begin now in earnest.


1. See The Marriage Movement: A Statement of Principles (New York: Institute for American Values, 2000).

2. In addition, this level of analysis has recently been brought to what strikes me as full fruition. For a masterful and largely utilitarian defense of marriage, see Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher, The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better-Off Financially (New York: Doubleday, 2000). In a sense, Waite and Gallagher's success makes the next, or what I am calling foundational, level of analysis both necessary and potentially achievable.

3. On Father's Day, an unmarried but cohabiting father, full of self-congratulation, wrote in the New York Times, "My girlfriend's father now calls me his son-in-law and jokes that these days, by not being married, we are almost conventional. We have been to weddings and felt simultaneous longing and horror. . . . We usually don't feel any pressure. People around us know we're a real couple. We have a few friends to whom it seems important that we marry, but when we press them for why, they say stuff like, 'Well, you lcnow, just because you should.'" Daniel Voll, "Unwed Dad: Marriage Is Just a Maybe," New York Times, June 17,2001.

4. See Leora Friedberg, "Did Unilateral Divorce Raise Divorce Rates? Evidence from Panel Data," American Economic Review 88 (1998): 608-27; and Jonathan Gruber, "Is Making Divorce Easier Bad for Children? The Long Run Implications of Unilateral Divorce," Working Paper 7968 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2000).

5. See A Call for Family-Supportive Tax Reform (New York: Institute for American Values, 1999).

6. According to one recent survey, U.S. workers currently work on average about 2,000 hours per year, an increase of 4 percent since 1980, putting U.S. employees in the lead among the rich countries in average number of hours worked per year, ahead of European workers by about 30 percent, and even ahead of the traditionally hardworking Japanese. One of the reasons offered for this trend in the United States is "the triumph of consumerism in the culture." See Lonnie Golden and Deborah Figart, "Doing Something about Long Hours," Challenge,  November/December, 15-37.

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